Messages

[imgzoom]http://www.tulevik.eu/ags/roger_blue.png[/imgzoom]
Are we set with this Roger sprite? If so, then are there some additional must-have animations he should have?

I like the recoloring, and I feel it sets him enough apart from the other Roger.
I'm more of a Lucas guy myself, so I instantly thought of the reach-high reach-mid reach-low sprites used in those games.

But then again, if this is just a template, I don't think it would need more stuff. Though the more I see all this stuff the more I think "All this could be put in use to make some nicely updated demo games that we were talking about in another thread."

Selmiak, hurry up with the SpriteJam so we can start tinkering with the verb icons

That's a really nice background.
And the palette looks quite interesting. I'll have to give it a go in a background at some point.

[imgzoom]http://i.imgur.com/dMdl7Nn.png[/imgzoom]

I like the idea of a committee

Committees usually suck at whatever their mission is

Well, the idea is mostly to have a group of people decide which features make sense to push and which ones are really not that important and can wait.

Crimson is the one with the most engine knowledge, so even if he doesn't lead the committee he should definitely be the one that can estimate how costly any change is.

Good point, Getting a handle on the amount of effort and time required is essential before undertaking such a project. There needs to be certainty about the amount of resources required and and the amount of committed resources available.

I'm not only talking about big changes, but even for new features. Some stuff can look easy but be impossible once you look under the hood.

[Insert small introduction about how new I am to the forums and how I hesitate to contribute on this topic because I don't have knowledge/time to work on the AGS engine myself].

I like the idea of a committee, one that should be formed by people that has worked on the engine and people that has used the engine a lot.
Crimson is the one with the most engine knowledge, so even if he doesn't lead the committee he should definitely be the one that can estimate how costly any change is.
But that raises a different question, which is, what role he wants to be in.

A lot of people in this topic (including me) have showed no interest on keeping compatibility with previous versions.
CW: Would not having to care about compatibility with previous versions give you more room to breathe and make working on the engine something that wouldn't stress you as much as it is now? Or would it be the same?

I'm guessing that creating an AGS4 from scratch would be a huge task. How much of the AGS3.x code could be reused without falling into the issues AGS has in terms of intricate code?
CW: Would working on something like this still be a painful experience for you?

BTW, it is easy to script a function that would replace the colors on dynamic sprite according to certain rule. You can create a set of sprites in greyscale, for example, and template will have several coded presets (color mappings), one of which would be chosen and applied in the game_start function.

Now I'm really interested in this. How would it work? The only way I thought of by looking at the help manual is to separate BGs from icons, use the Tint function to add monochrome colours on them and then compositing them. (I have done this before on other games, but never on AGS... I really should read up and test the DynamicSprite section).

Ah okay, like scanning the image with GetPixel.

Or that would work as well.

Ali raises a valid points and CW has the solution, though that would require making the template some kind of short demogame that explains where to define the colormapping or where to switch the predefined palettes.

This could be interesting, and better than duplicating assets for multiple character games.

I like CC's greyish version, but let's not jump ahead, we should first all be happy with the basic palette for the first iteration of the icons and so, have some contests, get the final designs, then we can play around with palette swappings to darkness and brighter values and vote on that. Well, noone is stopping you from experimenting with palette swapping now already, but we don't need it atm.

Thanks, but those were just to point out that palette swapping on assets is easy when you have a small palette. The green-pink one was deliberately low on contrast and non-generic.

@Borders:
What about we don't define the borders now, but rather say max 2px wide borders (or 3px max?) please on icons that are w x h and then see what comes out of the contest, both borders and the icons.
So if nothing game/template/contest breaking happens in the next few hours I'll make a thread for this in the competitions board tonight. I'd say gIconbar is the first thing from the template to get the overhaul.
Does anyone have a fancy title for all this? Like RessurAGSion. Or like, better than this?

I'm completely up for it. except for the punny name .
I'd also only start with the basic 320x200 resolution and leave the HD ones for later.

However, I have to say: if the idea is to replace the default sierra template then I think these icons make too strong a colour statement. Blue and orange are pretty contrasty - they're not going to work well with low-saturated artwork. It could be very difficult to use this artwork for a horror game, or a mystery noir, for instance.

In an ideal world, no one would use the default graphics. But since people do, I think they should be as neutral as possible. I think buttons that use one easy-to-change colour, or greyscale would be more useful. Perhaps there should be neutral / monochrome / high contrast alternatives?

The idea (at least how I see it) is to use a very limited palette (so far only 8 colors) just so anyone can quickly change them as needed if they wanted to:

[imgzoom]http://i.imgur.com/st1Jwgt.png[/imgzoom]

Maybe we could vote for different palette colours for the default Sierra Template once the icons are made. I did the blue/orange one because I found cute the idea of basing it on the blue cup.

I like reserving the blues for the backgrounds. The shadow-of-the-object color is redundant though, the darkest blue also fits there and frees another color slot.
I tried introducing some contrasty greens for more colors for the actual objects but it all looks crap Maybe I didn't go dark enough, but green is somehow not the color to go for, at least I didn't find a fitting hue of green, then I tried some deep purple 
[imgzoom]http://i.imgur.com/8N5AM5R.png[/imgzoom]

Yeah, purple is the direction I was already going with the orange/gold dark tones.
I added a fourth blue color just to have more options when it came to making borders, but I never really used it.

How generic should the borders be? I did that double-line border because it felt more interesting that just doing the classic 3-shade bevel button.

[imgzoom]http://i.imgur.com/FxuTTFc.gif[/imgzoom]

[imgzoom]http://i.imgur.com/75w3zF4.gif[/imgzoom]

As for fonts, these are the ones I made for different games, most of them are missing characters, but that is easily fixable, if needed be. Though from what I recall there are tons of fonts already in the forums right?

Spoiler

[imgzoom]http://i.imgur.com/7k4FbvJ.png[/imgzoom]

[close]

I like it, but I wouldn't go so red.

[imgzoom]http://i.imgur.com/SRN2CAK.png[/imgzoom]

@CasearCub:
In which case should the palettes be used?

I was mostly thinking of the idea of using one set of colors for the UI panels, and the other for the icons, and maybe the fonts, like this:

[imgzoom]http://i.imgur.com/xiZf7JK.png[/imgzoom]

Selmiak was mentioning the idea of having a small palette for the UI in general, and he mentioned it would be nice in blue-cup blue.
So that's why I decided to make these two.

I am stopping myself from designing more, because several people mentioned the idea of making it a contest.

I'll see if I find some of the fonts I already made for AGS and post them here for consideration if anyone cares.

[Edit]

If we want a blue-cup blue palette, orange gives the best contrast.

[imgzoom]http://i.imgur.com/OIc99gT.png[/imgzoom] [imgzoom]http://i.imgur.com/fKLItXx.png[/imgzoom]

Edit Added one using the forum blue cups as a base.

I'd just like to mention that we had this discussion in 2006 as well.
http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/forums/index.php?topic=27959.0

I think I have the assets still cached on my drive, the "new" Roger was drawn quite nicely.

So, we have had nicer assets that could be used on the Sierra template since over a decade?
Now I really want to see them.

[Palette]

Palette:
How many colors do we want? I'd say something between 4-16.
If we set a fixed palette we can easily swap images between contest entries in the final template!
Anyone up for defining a varied colorful and contrasty palette with low colorcount?

The palette should be divided on GUI windows and borders and the verb icons themselves.
I'd go for 16 if we plan to redo the whole GUI.
If you want the entries to be swappable it might be a good idea to ask for monochrome icons (which also means the palette can be changed more easily later on if needed).
I think it would be nice to customise the whole UI, including the sliders and even the Quit window (I remember going crazy the first time I used AGS looking where it was in the GUI list).

Resolution(s)
How many resolutions should this support. What are the icon- and box- sizes in the different resolutions?

I think we have 4 main resolutions: 320x200, 640x480, 720p and 1080p
Older classic resolutions like 800x600 and 1024x768 can accommodate the 720p ones.

Yes, there is:
[imgzoom]http://i.imgur.com/p0aFGcE.png[/imgzoom]

Am I the only one that finds it funny using for the Sierra template icons that are inspired by Sam and Max Hit the Road?

looking nice already. What do the ? and X button do anyways?

I'm guessing options and quit

You are correct Ben X!

I think it would be great to renew the art of the default UI.
And I'm willing to help with the pixeling (or participate in a contest).

I'm up to doing cursors, window borders, buttons, fonts or other UI elements.

What I'm just thinking now is that it might be interesting to also offer an out of the box high resolution default UI.
Now that AGS supports 720/1080p we should take advantage of showing that off on the templates.

I just recently watched the original ending, the most expensive ($7M I believe) cut scene of all time, and IT'S SO MUCH BETTER than the theatrical ending.

I recalled reading in a film magazine back in the '90s about this scene, which only showed a few still images, and the writer's hope that one day the footage would see the light of day...Then I thought, "Hey, I bet it's on youtube!", and I had a wonderful 15 minutes reliving the magic of the movie as it should have been.

It was on the extras of the DVD version I owned, really fun.

["The darkness must go down the river of night's dreaming"]

I love that movie.

Ok, let's do something easy:

"The darkness must go down the river of night's dreaming"

The Little Shop of Horrors.

[Rendezvous With Rama]

Over the last 6 months or so, I've been delving into classic science fiction stories.  I have read the following:

Arthur C. Clarke
- Rendezvous With Rama

I loved Rendezvous With Rama, but be warned that the sequels are not as good. I personally hate them with fervour.
Dune is a really nice read, despite the intimidating thickness.

I think it would be neat to have a demo game or even several tutorial like ones to help newcomers.

My free time varies a lot, but I would be up to helping with it (specially UI stuff, icons, cursors, inventory, fonts...).

Oh, well, my point was we should not call any template "default"... 
Just "Sierra Classic", "LucasArts classic/9verb", "Two clicks", "One click", "Blank"... something most ppl can relate to and make their 2nd most important decision about their game, which interface they want to use. 

I like this idea